Participatory methodologies for the organic planning of family production units in Casimiro de Abreu e Silva Jardim - RJ
Agroecology. Participatory methodologies. Certification
The regulatory framework defined by Law 10.831 of 2003 and regulated by Decree Nº 6.323 of 2007 has made organic quality assurance processes more accessible to low-income family farmers. Through Social Control Organizations (SCO) and Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS), family farmers can ensure the organic quality of their product at more affordable costs compared to audit certification. However, both the SCO and the PGS require the farmers' families and the rural extension and technical assistance agencies to take a systemic approach to issues related to production units, mainly materialized in the preparation of the document entitled "Organic Management Plan". In agriculture, the systemic approach has become increasingly necessary, due to the growing complexity of man-made and organized systems and the emergence of the concept of sustainability, which has introduced new challenges in rural areas, especially in relation to the socio-environmental issue. The adjustment of farm families to the regulations requires ATER to break with the conventional model of interpretation and reality analysis based on reductionism. In this sense, the objective of this work is to develop participative methodologies for the elaboration of Organic Management Plans in thes cope of family production units belonging to a group of SPG-ABIO (Association of Biological Producers of the State of Rio de Janeiro), in municipalities of Casimiro de Abreu e Silva Jardim in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in order to reflect and improve the tools of planning formulation, as well as the management of the property by the management family, meeting the requirements of the Organic Law regulation, and optimizing ATER actions in this context. In order to meet this objective, methodologies such as the transversal walk and the making of spoken maps were applied to the familiar production units to support the elaboration of the Organic Management Plans, using participant observation, a self-administered questionnaire, and of the data collection of the ABIO forms to analyze the relevance of these methodologies, as well as the increase of agroecological practices in the production units, between March 2016 and March 2018. The study allowed to conclude that the applied participatory methodologies are significant in what agroecological knowledge, and that the farmers involved appropriated their products, adopting them in their group dynamics, evidencing the need to improve the tools and strategies for the elaboration of the Organic Management Plans with in the scope of the family farming.